From: syderange@aol.com (Syderange)
Newsgroups: alt.books.reviews
Subject: Review of "Been Down So Long..."
Date: 15 Mar 1995 19:20:16 -0500

Been Down So Long That It Looks Like Up To Me
by 
Richard Farina


If the title sounds a bit familiar, you may remember it as the title to a
Doors song.  Jim Morrison, that pre-fab posterboy for nihilism and teenage
angst knew the real thing when he saw it. Just two short days after the
book's publication in 1966, Richard Farina took a header off a motorcycle 
letting loose a misplaced but not lost literary legend.  Chronicling the
short academic life of mushroom chewing, "paragoric" smoking, Red Cap
swilling Gnossos Pappadopoulis, Farina created a character that is the
bastard son of Kerouac's "tea" smoking Neal Cassidy fictionalization Dean
Moriarty, and an embarrassingly burnt uncle to Coupland's Slackerbabies.

In this fictionalized account of his own time spent at Cornell University
in the late 50's, Farina spiderwebs all the different wisps of smoke that
would eventually wildfire college campuses  throughout the country into a
complex novel that explains how the coming anthem of "sex, drugs and rock
and roll" was originally the property of only a tiny band of edge dwellers
before being rallied around and co-opted by the suburban pre-mall hordes.

The 1983 reissue by Penguin Books includes a new Introduction by a college
drinking buddy of Farina's, none other than little Tommy Pynchon.* 
Reminiscing about his college days with Farina, Pynchon tells how one
Halloween long ago he found himself at a costume party where the future
literati were  dressed as their favorite authors.  Pynchon came as F.
Scott Fitzgerald and Farina as Ernest Hemingway.  They had the roles
reversed.  Farina used his motorcycle like Fitzgerald's bottle to launch
himself into the pantheon of young dead heroes while you've got to wonder
if Pynchon might be thinking that the shotgun in the corner is beginning
to look pretty good.    

*Hey, it's not like he's gonna come after me.
copyright 1995 David M. Glitzer